


Always Enough

by Greyrey-lo (Punkpoemprose)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bendemption, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Intimacy, Past Abuse (Not Reylo Related), Post-Canon Fix-It, Resurrection, Soft Ben Solo, rey's parentage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23150176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Punkpoemprose/pseuds/Greyrey-lo
Summary: After losing Ben on Exegol Rey feels like a part of her is missing. As she crosses the galaxy and learns more about herself and her past, she finds that no one is ever really gone.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30
Collections: Reylo Charity Anthology: Volume 2





	Always Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I had so much fun writing this for this year's charity anthology. It was really fun trying to write a post-TROS fix it that felt like it aligned itself with TROS (as messy as that film was). Finding a way to make Rey Palpatine fit with my personal view of Star Wars was a struggle, especially because I wrote this just shortly after the film came out without a lot of the "word of god" fixes that have come out from the creators since. I hope you enjoy!

After Tatooine, she’d returned to Jakku. There was so little there for her now. It was just a place where a little girl had spent years waiting on people who would never return. It was a place where she’d once lived and a place she’d suffered, but not a place she called home.

She told herself that she’d returned to find any things she’d left behind, bits of her life before the war, but there was nothing left. She shoveled out the sand in the AT-AT by hand, because that’s what she’d always done, and found little. Her belongings had long since been picked over. Her helmet sat where she’d left it, a little doll she’d made as a child sitting within it, things that no scrapper, no scavenger deemed worthy of taking.

She ran her hands over them wistfully and stared at the section of durasteel wall where she’d last made a mark to count the days she’d spent alone. The little scratches brought her pain, every single one marked a day since her parents deaths, and she couldn’t even remember their faces. When she managed to recall them at all, it was the moment of their death, a stolen memory provided by the Force to teach her the truth and stab one final blade into her chest.

She’d pulled all the blades out now, and she was bleeding, but not so profusely that she wouldn’t survive. No, she had to live, even on the days where it felt useless to try. Too many had given their lives for her to live on, and she would, even when it felt like a living death.

She reached out with the Force, calling it to her in a way that felt natural, like it was an extension of her reach instead of a separate energy. Her throat was tight when she pulled the sand up from the floor and crashed and swiped it against the wall, grinding away each mark she’d painstakingly made until the metal was rubbed smooth and shiny.

She buried the helmet and the doll in a crushing weight of earth, sending them below the sands like she had Luke and Leia’s sabers, and allowed herself a moment of mourning for the hope she’d had there. She closed her eyes and didn’t fight the tears that slipped through the corners, letting them roll down her cheek as she remembered Maz’s words.

_The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead._

She’d thought she’d found it.

The sensation of fingers on her cheek, the fleeting feeling of lips on hers that felt solid and real caused her to open her eyes again. She found nothing there and sighed into the open and empty air. To expect more would have been foolish.

She’d come to retrieve her things and she’d found nothing but a deep sadness. Her chest ached when she left the wreckage, but she felt a sense of closure as she walked away. The girl who had waited endlessly had answers and she wasn’t waiting anymore.

When she left the planet, she made no plans to return. Thinking of Finn, she smiled. He’d like the idea of her not wanting to “go back to Jakku”. He wouldn’t necessarily approve of where she was setting her coordinates next, but as it was, he was half the galaxy away with Rose and Poe and the rest of the Resistance, planning provisional governments and doing what needed to be done.

She couldn’t take part. They’d wanted her help, but she hadn’t asked for any of this. She wasn’t built for government, for talking out how to allocate provisions or how rooting out the last of the First and Final Order supporters should be handled. She might have been able to do so if she hadn’t lost so much of herself to the war. As it was she felt only half alive most days, and she needed to be away from the Resistance for a while. She couldn’t give any more of herself to them until she reclaimed what she could of her heart and soul.

Chewbacca and Lando had offered to take her with them, they’d asked her to help them on their quest to find the histories of others who’d spent their lives alone because of the war, but she hadn’t been able to do that either. She needed to be alone for a while. Even the ghosts she’d seen in the Force seemed to understand that, showing themselves to her in moments where it was necessary but fading away abruptly as they’d come.

She only wanted to see one, and it seemed that he was unwilling, or unable to show himself.

She set a course for the only location she had left on her very short post-war travel roster. She had so little grasp of her life before Jakku and she’d only had a few points of interest from the war that she cared to revisit. Ahch-To, she thought might be her final destination, but she was unwilling to settle there yet, not when there was one last location she thought she might find answers or some sense of solace.

The Resistance and their provisional government had made quick work of locating as many First Order bases and properties as they could, both for the purpose of locating war criminals and for the fact that the materials held therein went further towards rebuilding than the meager resources the Resistance had at their disposal. Rose had told her that they were docking captured First Order vessels in ports along the outer rim, and that some ships were simply too large to land, including Star Destroyers like the Finalizer.

Knowing that for a short time the ship would be in open airspace gave Rey the thought to visit it. She still couldn’t believe that she was willingly going to the ship, but she had so little of Ben to hold onto, and while she’d managed somewhat to divorce the man she’d loved from Kylo Ren in her mind, she knew that somewhere on that ship there had to be something left of him. Ben Solo was always part of Kylo Ren, whether he’d admitted it to himself or not, and when all she had left of the man she loved was the memory of a kiss, and a sweater, looking through a First Order ship for even the slightest trace of him seemed worthwhile. She tried not to think about what her friends would think about her desperate quest to find remnants of their enemy’s life, but thought that perhaps Rose might understand the lengths she’d go to in order to feel even the vestiges of a connection she’d only started to know.

Red Five, Luke’s old X-wing, was nothing if not reliable, and while she’d returned BB-8 to Poe, the little D-O unit they’d salvaged from Ochi’s ship did well enough to help guide her to the location of the ship. She had docking clearance for half the galaxy now that the war was over, every Resistance and former First Order ship allowed her entrance, and there was little she needed to concern herself with once on board the Finalizer.

The remaining troopers and officers had long since been brought away to face justice, and despite a few Resistance allies doing their work to guard and strip the ships, she was alone once she landed aboard. No one would bother her, she was certain. Most people tried to avoid her since the celebrations after the final battle, no one liking the idea of bothering a “hero” let alone pestering the “last jedi”. She let it work to her advantage as once she landed, she was given only the most cursory glance and nod by those in the hangar. She was recognizable, and she supposed Luke’s old ship was even more so. No one questioned why she was there. She could feel their disinterest in the Force, the lot of them feeling that it wasn’t their business, focusing instead on the work they had to do.

She was comforted by their apathy. Everyone deserved a bit of time to focus on their work and not worry about the state of the Galaxy for once. She supposed that in a different life, one where she hadn’t been orphaned on Jakku, one where she hadn’t been Force sensitive, she might have been a lot like them. She had been a scavenger, and who better to disassemble war ships than someone who could imagine a better use for every part.

Little had changed after all given that she was finding herself, once again, in the emptiness of a ship, scouring it for something of value. That the items of value to her had changed so drastically from ship components to a dead man’s belongings was something that did amuse her somewhat. She let herself run the numbers on scrap as she walked from the hangar and into the ship proper. Scavengers on Jakku would be able to live their entire lives with full bellies from just one room of the ship.

She’d see to it that Poe and Finn were made aware of such when she felt up to it. Sending them transmissions with her thoughts on the prices and uses for scrapped ship materials was the best she could do for communication until she managed to find whatever it was, she was searching for. She thought that maybe it was whatever would heal the fractures in her heart and soul, but she didn’t know what it might be.

She hated to think that whatever it was, she’d never find it.

She could, however, find the former quarters of Kylo Ren easily enough. She’d been there before, she knew the way, and it was much easier to make her way there on an empty ship than it had been when the place was full of enemies.

Entering the space, it seemed, was the trouble.

Something in her gut twisted when she saw the door. How easy it would be for her to imagine him on the other side. Kylo Ren had been a monster, a twisted man, but she thought she might cry with joy to see him again. She’d fight him a thousand times over, she’d be stabbed and slashed and scarred, just on the off chance that she’d find Ben in him again. For just one more hour with Ben Solo, she’d gladly give her life.

She felt the ghost of fingertips brushing against her own, and the scar on her upper arm, the one she’d managed to give herself from the cross guard of his saber, ached. She reached a hand up to it and brushed her tingling fingers over it. She’d long since given up covering it up. It was a reminder of the first time they’d fought together, the first time he’d sacrificed a part of himself for her. The scar had set in her skin when they didn’t have enough bacta to go around, and while she had loathed the scar at first, she now saw it was proof of Ben Solo’s existence. Once she started to think of it that way she didn’t care who else saw the pride with which she wore the scar. It didn’t need to be pretty, it needed to be the part of her body that had been marked with the memory of him.

The doors slid open when she used the access panel, and she stood a bit straighter as she stepped inside. The scar stopped aching, but when she stepped in her heart broke to see that the impossible hadn’t happened. There was so much she could simply will into happening through the Force, but the arrival of Ben Solo in a space he hadn’t been in months was not one of them.

She glanced around and did her best to breathe steadily. The space was lighter than she remembered it being. Bright white light shone out at her as she stepped through the main living space, trying her best to not notice the burnt helmet of Darth Vader that still sat in rubble on the floor. It was difficult for her to imagine how much it had meant to Kylo and how Ben’s need to feel an attachment to a man who had died before his birth had been a factor in his own death. She pushed out at it with the Force, using the energy she found within her to scrape the remnants of the helm and its stand into a pile before she made her way to a small door on the opposite side of the room.

It opened for her when she approached it, and as she stepped in the lights in the room came on around her, brightening the space. It was simple, a bed, a closet, a door that lead to a fresher, but it had been untouched too. She couldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to enter the space let alone clear it out, despite her insistence to Poe and Finn and Rose and the rest of the Resistance that Ben Solo had died a hero, few were willing to look past Kylo Ren’s deeds.

She wasn’t even certain she could entirely, but still the fact that the space had been Ben’s, the fact that he’d lived there, meant something to her. That no one had been in the room since he last left it was a comfort she hadn’t expected to find, but it was one she let herself embrace.

A shirt hung off the edge of the bed, a plain black thing he must have worn as a underlayer. She picked it up cautiously and sat where it had been. The fabric was soft under her fingers and as the door to the room closed behind her, she laid back on the soft grey sheets of his bed. The space smelled of soap and sweat and Rey let herself imagine him laying in bed just the same as she was.

How long had it been since she slept?

_At night, desperate to sleep…_

She could remember him saying that to her though it felt like a lifetime away. That it was still a true statement almost made her want to laugh, but it came out a choked sob. She lifted his shirt up to her face, breathing it in. They’d had so little time.

She knew now that her parents had never really abandoned her. Ben hadn’t abandoned her either. She wanted to hate them for it, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t hate the people who had loved and tried to protect her. There was a difference between walking away and being taken away.

Too many people had died for her.

She let tears flow down her cheeks. She’d done more crying in the past few days than she’d done in many years and while it was cathartic in a sense, it hurt to let go. She’d spent most of her life trying not to feel, and now that she had started again, she couldn’t stop. Controlling ones emotions was the Jedi way, and she was proving to herself that despite her deep connection to the Force, that path was one that she would never truly walk as those before her had.

She kicked off her boots, and climbed further into the bed, resting her head on a pillow, holding his shirt to her chest and allowing herself to imagine him there with her. She was so exhausted. So much had happened in such a short time, and she’d lost everything.

“Be with me,” she whispered through her tears, her throat aching with a lump she couldn’t clear away. She’d tried meditating, she’d tried calling him to her, and to no avail. She’d never been particularly good at calling force ghosts to herself, but she’d thought that maybe with Ben it would be different. They were bonded, and surely that meant something even in death.

She cried as she drifted off to sleep, holding his shirt, holding herself, holding onto anything that felt solid.

\---

She was someplace green. A breeze brushed against her face and it was marvelously gentle, unlike the desert winds she was most used to. Moss squished beneath her bare feet and she took joy in it for a moment. The place was lush but lacked the humid warmth of the jungles she’d seen, the temperate forest around her reminded her of Takodana. She’d always fondly remember the first time she saw that planet. She truly hadn’t believed until that day that so much green existed in the galaxy, let alone on a single planet.

She walked on through the forest around her, breathing in the freshness of the air. Light filtered around her from the treetops, and she reveled in its glow, picking up speed and running through the trees. She didn’t know where she was going, but something was pulling her along in the direction she was running, something familiar but not entirely recognizable.

She could feel her hair falling out of the messy buns they’d been up in as she ran and it felt freeing as it fell around her shoulders. Everything was warm and bright and new around her. She saw an opening in the trees and broke through it, finding a lake just before her. It seemed familiar in a way she couldn’t name, and something further along the path called out to her. She allowed herself to ignore it for a moment. It had been too long since she’d been allowed a moment to rest.

She slowed and walked up to its edge, stepping ankle deep into the clear sparkling water. The stones underfoot were smooth and cool. The sensation soothed aches she’d forgotten she’d had. She’d spent so little time worrying about her body and its needs since she left Exegol, and the relief she felt made her want to lay entirely in the water and just float.

Instead she leaned forward and looked at her reflection in the water. She almost didn’t recognize herself smiling with her hair down. She hadn’t smiled in days. She hadn’t let herself relax in months.

Just in front of her, a more familiar face was reflected. Dark eyes and a soft smile she thought she’d never see again.

She whipped around so quickly that she lost her balance, slipping on the wet stones and falling into warm solid arms. She let herself be held up, clutched to his chest as she tried to make sense of what was happening.

“Ben?” Her voice was barely a whisper when she said his name.

She felt warmth, nothing but warmth. He said nothing, but his hands wandered down her back cautiously until he was holding her waist.

She looked up, back to his face. He was smiling, and it was only the second time she’d seen him smile, really smile. She reached her hand up to cup his cheek and he closed his eyes peacefully when she slid her fingertips down his cheek and over his jaw. It felt so good to touch him, to be touched by him. She could spend an eternity in his arms, but she knew in her heart that it would never be an option.

“You…” she shook her head, “You died Ben… this is…”

He opened his eyes and gave her a sad look, “A dream.”

\---

When she woke, she was still in his bed. She wasn’t certain of how much time had passed since she laid down, but she felt somewhat rested. She was on her side, staring at the wall when she felt the faint sensation of a hand stroking her hair.

She closed her eyes and let the rest of her dream play out in her waking mind. She told herself that she was still there, in all that strangely familiar green, with Ben kissing her on the lakeshore. She couldn’t envision anything more than just that. To imagine that moment was real was hard enough, imagining a reality where she could have more than that with him was impossible.

She felt something more, a kiss on the uncovered part of her shoulder but turned to find the empty air she expected. She let her fingers hover over the skin there anyway and shivered. The room had a light chill to it, and it took no more coaxing for her to stand up and cross the room to the closet. The t-shirt she’d already found was certainly coming with her, but she was cold and the sweater of his, all that had been left of him when he’d gone, was on the ship with the rest of her belongings.

Everything in the closet was unsurprisingly black, but it was easy enough for her to locate a long cloak and pull it around her shoulders. She’d seen him in it more times than she could count, to wear it made her feel closer to him. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

She walked around the room and looked for signs of Ben amongst the vestiges of Kylo Ren. There wasn’t much, but they were there. Parchment on a desk, something written on it in a language she didn’t know. There was a data pad beside it that she picked up and opened.

There was little about the device that was personal. Some files were stored on its main page, reports and legers from what she could tell. They interested her very little, and while she thought that they may have some use to Poe and the others, she imagined it was nothing that they didn’t already know about.

It exhausted her, to have so little of him on the device. She knew that she shouldn’t have held her breath, setting the device back onto the desktop she’d found it on to turn her attention back to the parchment.

She hadn’t seen anyone ever write on something by hand, unless it was scribing something on metal. Parchment was expensive, no one had really felt the need to record things on it since the Jedi, and their use of it was half ritualistic and half “you can’t hack paper”. To know that it was something that Ben had done meant something to her, even if she couldn’t determine what the pages said.

She ran her fingers over the carefully written letters. Would he have told her what the words meant? She closed her eyes and imagined another life where he was holding his hand over hers, helping her write something in such an elegant script with a pen. It was something she’d never done herself but would love to learn from him.

She opened her eyes when she felt a hand on hers. There was nothing there, but she kept feeling him around her, her mind creating stolen moments, breath on her neck, light touches on her skin, kisses in her hair, even though she knew they were impossible. He was gone, and she was rummaging anxiously through his things just to chase the feeling of knowing him.

She felt the parchment crinkling under her fingers as she tensed and quickly set them back down on the surface. She flattened her hand across the sheets, smoothing them down carefully before stepping away to look around the rest of the room. She would take the papers with her too. She’d figure out what they said and whether it was anything important, but she wouldn’t turn them over to Finn or Poe or Rose or anyone else until she knew it was something that they needed to know about. They were something that he’d spent time doing, something that held significance to him that went beyond the files on his mostly empty data pad, and she wanted to keep them for the fact that they showed the humanity in him. She wondered who had taught him to write like that. Maybe Leia or Luke, she thought, but surely not Han.

There was little else in the space beyond the blankets on his bed and a few more pieces of clothing. Otherwise there were only a neat stack of blank pages and an inkwell and pen, a few loose metal fittings that looked like they might have been parts for his saber, and a small plant. That surprised her the most. It was sitting in a pot on his bedside table. It seemed like it had survived rather well despite not being watered in quite some time.

It was fernlike, and Rey extended a hand to the little leaves which curled in towards the heat of her fingertips. She wasn’t certain of where it originated from or what it might even be called, but liked that it seemed to have something of a personality. She smiled fondly at it and decided that it too would come along with her.

She thought, in a moment of excitement, that maybe she’d be able to look it up. She crossed the room again to the data pad, opening its search utility to find some sort of index of plants with which she might manage to find what he’d been tending to.

Instead when she opened it, she saw herself face to face with the last thing he’d looked up. After a moment she recognized an image in the corner of the screen. She nearly fell to her knees, faced with an image of the exact lake she’d dreamed him kissing her at. The exact lake that had been surrounded by familiar green forests.

At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean.

It hadn’t been an ocean at all. It had been a lake.

\---

Byss’s thick forests were vast, and despite Rey’s best efforts to find one, no one had mapped the planet in any significant way that would allow for her to find the lake she’d seen in her mind and on the data pad in Ben’s quarters. The photo itself had no location data attached beyond the coordinates of the planet, and while Rey could locate the planet itself on maps, it evidently had not warranted any thorough investigation by the First Order, the Resistance, or any of their predecessors. It was a mystery to her. Why had she dreamed of a mostly uninhabited planet in the deep core? Why she had dreamt about it so many times that it felt familiar?

She couldn’t recall ever having been there, she could count most of the planets she’d ever been to on one hand. Yet she felt as if every tree she passed was one she had passed a thousand times before. She reached out with the Force, trying to locate a source for the sense of familiarity, and found no answers beyond something through the trees that was calling to her. There was a raw energy somewhere ahead, a place where the Force pooled deep and rich like the cave she’d found on Ahch-To. There was a darkness to it, and yet it was mixed with something else, something brighter. She couldn’t explain it, so instead she walked toward it.

“Now would be the perfect time for someone to come and tell me what’s going on,” she muttered under her breath, striding through the woods alone.

It seemed that the Force was perfectly content to provide more questions than it did answers and to take more than it gave. Rey was, for the most part, used to it. Yet she couldn’t help but to think that maybe, for once, she deserved a win.

She continued to follow the trail of energy. The nearer she came to it, the more familiar it felt to her, and the less she needed to focus on it to follow it to its source. It was strange to her how simple it was after a short time to sense her way through the trees without reaching out. The energy called to her like a familiar voice and she followed without fear until she broke through the trees and found the clear blue waters she knew would be there.

The lake was as beautiful as it had been in her dreams. There was a stillness to it, but the surface rippled slightly as a breeze brushed over it, causing little tufts of grass that had grown amongst the rocks on the shore to lazily dance. It was a peaceful place, and yet Rey still felt the pull of the Force carrying her on and down the shore, closer to the strange mixture of darkness and familiarity that she could not fight against.

She imagined what Luke might have to say about such a thing, recalling his intermingled fear and annoyance when she’d left the Sith cave on Ahch-To. She decided not to focus on it too heavily, choosing to believe that if he wanted to dissuade her from following the pull, he could very well manifest to her now and give her some answers himself.

She found the hut on the shore and almost immediately turned back. Something in the back of her mind was begging her to turn away from it, and yet something too was calling her toward it. Something in her that was and wasn’t sensitive to the Force wanted her to be there, and she chose to believe, in that moment, that whatever it was, wasn’t malicious.

Ben, even as Kylo Ren wouldn’t have lead her to something that would hurt her. That much she knew, and while she thought that perhaps this was all some kind of mistake and coincidence that was leading her to this place instead of his intentions or anyone else’s, she had to believe that there was something more to it. She had nowhere else to go, no more paths to follow, and she wasn’t content to simply return to Jakku to die in the sand or live out her days in exile on Ahch-To.

As she approached the building, a familiar voice played in her thoughts.

_You'll be safe here. I promise._

The flash of her father’s face in her memory brought tears to her eyes. She did remember him. He had a strong jaw and dark hair and he’d smile at her when she was being mischievous. As she touched the wall of the structure, she fell onto her knees.

_She knew this place. She knew this place in more than a dream, because it was her home._

_She saw herself, a swaddled baby in the arms of a woman she was never able to know. She bounced and swayed and hummed as she soothed her child. She looked so young, her face untouched by wrinkles or worry lines, but her eyes told stories of struggle and pain. A man walked into the small space, a bit older than the woman and with a demeanor that said he’d seen too much pain for his years. He was frowning, but the look softened when he walked towards the woman and child._

_“We’ll be safe here for now.”_

_The woman gave him a tired look. “The energy here…”_

_He nodded, “I know, but it will mask us. It will mask her. It’s the last place he’d think to look. He’s arrogant, he thinks we’re running scared, he’ll run to the edges of the galaxy, but he’d never believe we’d be right under his nose.”_

_She nodded gravely and looked down to the baby in her arms, leaning in to press a kiss to her little face before handing her off to the man who happily took the bundle. Having the baby in his arms seemed to remove some of the fear from his eyes and eased the hurt he carried in the set of his jaw._

_“Hear that Rey? Everything is going to be alright starlight.”_

Rey gasped when she came back to herself, her heart racing as she reached out with the Force for some stability. Something in the energy around her cracked open, raw and bleeding energy, like a wound. She let it coil around her as she heaved herself onto her shaking legs.

A gentle touch to her back, one she knew, one that had been following, or perhaps leading her across the stars, helped her to stand. She knew that there would be no one there when she turned around, so she pushed out some of her energy toward it in thanks. She had so many questions that needed answers, and while she’d just received some, she knew that she needed to push further, to follow the source of that cracked wound in the Force, the one that had called her to Byss. The one her parents had used to hide her from Palpatine.

She wished, not for the first time, that she hadn’t used her staff to build her new saber. While the thing had been helpful in that regard, she would have loved to have it to counterbalance herself as she walked weakly on, closer and closer to the place where darkness dwelled.

She passed the hut on the lake, moving behind it, through the trees again, until she felt the energy all but burn around her. The trees thinned as she marched on, as if the blazing heat in the Force had prevented them from growing.

She nearly fell again when she brushed against one of the few growing trees and was hit with the energy of another memory that the Force had attached to the place.

_“Rey no!”_

_Her father was running after her. He looked so scared and she…_

_She was running from him on toddling little legs because she’d done something wrong and her mother had seemed scared and something in the woods was calling to her, telling her that it was okay to be afraid._

_She bumped into the tree and scraped her elbow, and it hurt, but she didn’t turn around to ask her father to heal it like he and her mother always did when she got hurt because she wanted to know what was calling to her in the woods._

_“Starlight, please stop!”_

_But she couldn’t stop._

Rey blinked away tears as she continued on. She’d been so small. She barely remembered ever having been so small other than when she’d first arrived to Jakku. She had a feeling, although she couldn’t fully place it, that the day she’d been shown, the day she’d run toward the same dark energy she was marching towards now, had been the last day she’d spent on Byss.

She pressed forward, feeling the invisible hand gently brush against her arm. It felt so cool against the blazing heat in the space. It was soothing. She drew strength from it and allowed herself to believe, for a moment, that she wasn’t walking alone.

_You’re not alone._

She saw the structure standing amongst fallen trees and stones. It too was familiar, and yet the nearer she got, the less it felt right. The harshness, the darkness of the energy was strong enough to make her feel like she was back in the burning sands of Jakku, it tugged at her in ways that made her want to vomit, but there was something else mingled within it. It was as if the dark was artificial, like its strength came from something that shouldn’t be there and that the other energy that the space held, small and smothered, but there, was being held down.

The structure itself was made of stone. It was less so a structure in the sense of a building as it was three tall pillars and an arch that made a rough square space at the center of which there appeared to be an altar of sorts. She’d run all the way to it as a child.

She reached into the satchel at her side and felt the guiding hand, the cool hand, the spirit at her side, wrap its hand around hers reassuringly as she wrapped her hand around her lightsaber’s hilt. It followed her as she withdrew the blade and activated it.

“Be with me,” she whispered into the air around her, and while no ghost appeared before her, she felt the cool embrace of the spirit at her back, holding her steady against the darkness in the space.

It was Ben.

She knew that it was because no one in her life had ever loved her so much as he did, and she could feel that love radiating through her as he held her close.

It had been Ben all along, and she hadn’t been able to admit it to herself because it meant that she couldn’t come to her in any other way than this.

“This is enough,” she whispered, because it had to be. “You are enough Ben… thank you.”

She strode forward with his energy at her back, with him shielding her from the blackness swirling in the Force around them.

Upon the altar she saw a holocron. She didn’t need to activate it to know what it held, because she felt in the very depths of her soul, that what it would relay to her was cruelty of the deepest, most cutting sort. It was a choking blackness that held back the light and she knew that it needed to go. With all the energy she could find in herself and from Ben, who felt solid and real at her back, she drew her blade, and struck the Sith artifact down.

\---

The blast back of energy from the relic, from the space, was enough to send Rey flying. She was out before she even landed, having only the vague half-conscious understanding that she was being forced away from the structure before she mentally checked out of the moment and was transported back to a moment long before her time.

_Where is our son?_

_The man prowled more than he walked. It was a stretch to even call him a man, his face pale and shriveled and portraying such evil in his intentions that it was palpable._

_A woman, dark haired and far too young and small to stand with the poise she did against such a beast, shook only slightly when she took a step towards the beast and away from the walls of the cell in which she was confined._

_“My son is somewhere you will never find him.”_

_She had freckles on her nose and her eyes were flecked with gold._

_“Your son,” the monster sneered, “You would have no son if it were not for my will. He doesn’t belong to you, he belongs to me.”_

_The woman held her head higher and strode, again, even closer. She would not back down. It would be the death of her, but she would no go quietly or meekly._

_“He belongs only to himself.”_

_When he choked the life out of her, she didn’t give him the satisfaction of a scream or of even softening slightly in her regard towards him._

Everything was black around her. She couldn’t open her eyes out of exhaustion, but Rey cried for the woman in the vision, the one the exploded holocron had forced her to endure. She looked so much like her grandmother it was painful. Her father had grown up without parents as well, and in his fight to ensure that she would have a better life than he did, he’d made the same sacrifice as his mother.

She cried and chased the call of sleep that promised to soothe the pain in her heart and the ache in her body. That she felt herself being lifted from the forest floor was something she was only slightly cognizant of.

\---

The water lapped around her, cooling her skin. She tried to sit up, but was hushed softly when she tried to move. She reached out with the Force, her eyelids still refusing to open, to give up the last dregs of sleep that her body was telling her she needed.

The darkness was not gone, but it was calmed, balanced. The holocron was gone, and with it the intense and all-consuming miasma of wrongness that had been clinging to the place. Now she felt the light rising back to its natural level, swelling and leaving the strong well of Force energy not too far off feeling balanced. She let herself relax, feeling a familiar energy much closer by.

“I don’t want to open my eyes,” she whispered.

Strong arms held her aloft, keeping her still in the water, while taking the sting from her skin. She knew what happened when she looked for Ben. When she turned around, when she opened her eyes she’d find nothing there.

“That’s alright,” he said, his voice rich and deep, “Rest a little longer. You haven’t slept well in so long.”

Softer, in almost a whisper, he added, “I’ve got you.”

Rey let her eyelids flutter open. She hadn’t been able to hear him talk before. That, she thought, was new.

The sun was bright in her eyes, its glow softened only by the silhouette of a face looking down upon her. She didn’t need to wait for her eyes to adjust as they filled again with tears.

“Ben?”

He hushed her again, large hands holding onto her traced little circles on her skin as she came back to her senses fully.

“Yes sweetheart, it’s me.”

Rey’s chest ached with the need to understand and with the need to just be held. He was there, and solid and holding her. She could hear his voice and see his ears poking out from his hair.

“How?”

He shifted her, carrying her through the water and closer to shore. She could feel energy flowing through her, his energy. He was healing her, stealing the aching from her body and replacing it with the comforting cool of his energy. As they moved, she could see him more clearly.

No bluish glow, just pale, unmarred skin. His dark eyes were taking in her expression as she woke and she couldn’t help but reach a weak hand up to brush against his plush lips.

When he kissed her hand, she wept.

“How?” she repeated through her tears as he carried her from the water and towards the little hut that had once, many years before, been her home.

\---

It didn’t make much sense to her, and she could tell that it didn’t make much sense to Ben either. When he’d died on Exegol, he hadn’t become one with the Force, not like his Mother and Uncle had upon their deaths. He hadn’t been sent off to some restful place but instead had been sleepless, attached to her somewhere between life and death with no way to break through. That was why she’d been able to feel his barely there touches, but why she couldn’t see him, why he hadn’t been able to communicate with her, even through their bond.

He had to watch her mourn him.

“How did you know about Byss?”

He had set her down on a dust covered bench in the hut, pulling his shirt from her bag and using it to dry her skin with gentle hands. She thought, for a moment, to take the cloth from him and do the work herself, but she couldn’t deny that being cared for was anything but deeply pleasing after so much time spent caring for herself alone.

“I didn’t,” he said as he looked her over for more injuries, his hands sliding over her carefully like she was about to break, “I found some information about Palpatine having labs here years ago and before I found the way finder I thought maybe this was where he’d be. I knew there was a Force Nexus here, but that it had any significance beyond that…”

He trailed off and Rey leaned forward to press her forehead against his. She closed her eyes and let herself focus on his breathing, matching hers to it as they sat there together.

“That… Nexus…” She addressed the place, just a short walk from where they were that held within it a well of energy, no longer dark, but not entirely light either, “Do you think destroying the holocron had something to do with…?”

She reached out and put her hands on his arms, illustrating her point. Whatever she’d done, whatever had happened, had brought him back to her.

She opened her eyes when she felt his nose bump against hers and saw him gazing at her lips. She couldn’t help but smile. She was busy being surprised, trying to figure out what had happened, and he was focused on her.

“I… I can only guess, but I think that holocron was functioning like some kind of amplifier and suppressor for the Force Nexus. It was holding back the light and increasing the output of the dark, so when you removed it there was an explosion of energy while it rebalanced itself. It blew you back, but I think it… I don’t know. I think I absorbed some of it, like it gave me the energy that I’d given you.”

She nodded. It was a good an answer as any, and with the shock of it all leaving her feeling more settled than she had felt in a very long time, she chose to finally let down her guard.

She lowered her shields, ones she hadn’t even remembered putting up in the first place and felt for the frayed remnants of her bond with Ben. She picked up on them easily and instinctively knew how to reconnect them, leaning forward slightly and pressing her lips to his.

His side of the bond flared to life, their energies reconnecting and swirling between them with a bright comforting energy. His lips moved on hers and she opened her mouth for him when his tongue prodded against her lower lip. It felt natural to breathe with him, for her hands to travel up and down his back as he pulled her closer to him. Their noses bumped again and she pushed a feeling of amusement to him across the bond which he reciprocated.

“You can’t begin to understand how long I’ve wanted to do that,” he said against her lips when they broke for air, his voice deep and heady.

Rey couldn’t help but smile at his words, her kiss swollen lips pressing another kiss to his before she allowed her wandering hands to card through his hair.

He closed his eyes and let out an appreciative groan when her fingers scraped against his scalp. It was a needy noise, and she slid her body even closer to his, her rear barely on the bench as she put herself closer and closer to his lap as he knelt on the floor before her.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this,” she said, pressing her body into his, feeling almost delirious in her joy at his being there. She’d been so afraid of what a life might be like without him that she hadn’t given herself the time she deserved to imagine how good a life with him might be.

She let her hips shift forward toward his and opened her mind to him, pushing all the times, few as they were, that she’d thought about having her body on his now that the war was over. She sent him her dream with the lake, she showed him her more risqué dreams, the ones where she let him “win” for once where he touched her in all the right ways and she let him do it.

“Kriff,” he muttered under his breath, “Sweetheart you’re…”

She couldn’t help the soft sound she made in the back of her throat for him. She’d been called a great many things in her life, most of them unkind, but she had never imagined how warm and safe and loved a name like sweetheart could make her feel.

“You’re alive,” she said, letting her fingers tug lightly at his hair when she felt the warm burst of energy through the bond that told her he liked the sensation. “You’re alive and I want to celebrate that. I have so many questions and I want to talk about what all of this means, but first… Ben I want to just be with you.”

He seemed lost for words, so she was only slightly surprised when he kissed her and stood, lifting her up with him. He sent his want and need across the bond to her, what he’d imagined doing to her when she laid in his bed on the finalizer, how badly he’d wanted to help her sleep.

She shivered in his arms and kissed him back like his mouth on hers was the only thing holding them both aloft.

\---

He’d made her wait.

He’d told her that she was worth more than just a quick celebration, and he’d set off to help her bring her things from the ship to the lakeshore. They’d bring the fighter over the next day, but he’d seemed dead set on setting up the little hut before nightfall. He’d known, just as well as she had, that she belonged here, on the lakeshore she’d dreamed of, with him.

Together they’d cleaned out the worst of the dirt and dust and Rey had rediscovered small snippets of memory as they worked. There was a little stove with a kettle stored in its belly. Her mother used to make tea with it. Rey recalled its whistle.

The place was made of stone, and it was solid despite the dirt and dust and tarnished items within it. Rey found it easy enough to imagine it as a home again. Ben took out the things too destroyed to serve their purpose, and when they brought in Rey’s meager belongings the place was at least fit to stay the night in.

It was that night, on a makeshift bed they’d managed on the floor, with the glow from the stove lighting the space that they decided that they’d both waited long enough.

“I’m surprised you took the letters,” he said, holding onto her, pressing kisses to the bare skin of the back of her neck and across her shoulders. “The plant made sense, you always liked plants, but I didn’t think you knew how to read Clynese.”

“Is that what it’s written in?” she asked, smiling as she pressed her back further into his front. He was holding her close, but she was uncertain if she’d ever be close enough to him to be truly satisfied, “I couldn’t read it, but I liked that you wrote it by hand. I’d never seen someone do that before.”

She could feel his joy through the bond, pleasure at the thought of her keeping something of his out of interest. She pressed back with her interest.

“It’s the alphabet they used on Corellia for a long time, but the words themselves are in basic.”

She hummed in response, “So what do they say?”

He fell quiet for a moment, and Rey felt warm when he pulled her tighter in his arms.

“They’re letters I wrote to you after Crait.”

“Oh. I imagine they’re not… complimentary?”

There was a heat between them, their bond burning hot and open between them in a way that Rey knew meant they were on the precipice of something.

“Actually… they were love letters. My anger with you… that was what was expected of me. I could show that, but the other things… what I was feeling for you that I couldn’t let people know… I wrote it down.”

“Oh.”

Rey couldn’t find words, so she sent him her understanding through the bond. She’d spent more nights than she’d admit to anyone dreaming of him, of moments like this, where he was holding her and everything was alright. Again, she sent him her more intimate fantasies, and in return he sent her his.

She flushed, images of his mouth on her in ways she’d never imagined playing through her thoughts and making her squirm against him. She liked that one, she liked that one very much.

He took note of her reaction and chuckled, the sound rich and exhilarating to Rey, who rolled to face him in return.

Kisses that had been chaste became deep as her hands and his ran over skin and removed clothes. His hands were gentle and curious as they traveled across her body. She jumped when he slipped his fingers under her breast band and in retaliation, she’d slipped her hands under his waistband.

They had no experience, but it wasn’t long before they were learning each other’s bodies in the most intimate ways they could imagine. They touched and kissed and moved together in ways that made their bond sing and that made pleasure flow through their bodies.

Rey’s lips were thoroughly bitten and kiss swollen by the time they had finished their intimacy for the night, and while they still both craved more, they were comforted in the knowledge that they would have plenty of time to explore one another further.

“Do you think you could be happy here?” she asked quietly as they laid together, intertwined and bare.

He didn’t hesitate to push his feelings to her through their bond. He sent her feelings of immense joy, of contentment and belonging, and she knew that the intention was to show her that those feelings were tied to her.

“You’re my other half,” he said, as if she needed more explanation, “Wherever you’re happy I will be too.”

“Where you are,” Rey replied, “Wherever you are will always be where I’m happiest.”

When he kissed her neck again, it was as chaste as it had been before, but now it also held the promise of rest and comfort.

She closed her eyes and let her fingers run up and down the arm he draped over her.

“Where you are,” he said with an air of finality, echoing what she’d said to him while he was still in the place between, “Where you are, Byss, Jakku, Ahch- To… wherever you are will always be enough for me to be happy.”

She took solace in his words and sent him her feelings of comfort and calm. They had the rest of their lives ahead of them, and their bond swirled between them with joy over the love and life that hung between them.


End file.
